Simon and Tim (and team) are working on a programming technology called Software Transactional Memory (STM) which provides an elegant, easy to use language-level abstraction for writing concurrent applications that is based on widely-understood conceptual constructs like Atomic operations (and, well, Transactions...). Simon, Tim and team do all the nasty locking work for you. With STM-enabled languages, you can just concentrate on the algorithms at hand and leave the low-level heavy lifting to the sub-system.